Posts by call me scruffy

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Quality and service...

The last time I bought a seagate drive it was an external which failed after less than 24 hours time mounted, and less than 2TB of throughput, when it wasn't hooked up to the Mac it was kept in it's original padded box.

Seagate's warranty was "You can have a refurb, not a new drive." and their recovery "service" was an extra £600, 50% more than disk labs were charging at the time.

I haven't bought another seagate since, and have yet to be let down by any of the WD drives I've bought.

Some use of the word "Devastating" with which I'm not familiar.

Bitcoin was an interesting idea, some people invested in it, most didn't. Infact some of the core developers cautioned against depending on it.

There were obvious problems with it from a sociological and technological point of view, and the currency eventually became devalued. For all the rhetoric you have more chance of a court taking a transaction seriously if it revolved around familiar good, servcies and currencies, and a lot of people want that security these days.

And let's not beat about the bush, some of the people who put money in, didn't know what they were getting, how many thought that "cryptographically secure" magically meant that transactions were untracable? Infact they were far from it!

I don't know for a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me if most of the remaining users are those who feel that the system owes them something. Can't blame them, maybe the system could, without this hit, have ridden out the crash and returned to some sort of value, and it's simple human nature having spent money on something, to keep hold of it.

TBH, they've a better chance than getting original market price on surplus 80287s, but that isn't saying muh :-s

Really?

Broadcom don't have a patent on CDMA (Plenty of Prior Art, not least the Global Positioning System!) Instead they have a patent on a horrendous mass of bodges, workarounds and fudges required for CDMA to work in a cellphone type environment. The only virtue CDMA has in cellular comms is the dubious one of making money for broadcom. In most practical tests it fails substantially less gracefully than TDMA or FDMA, quite tellingliy demonstrated from the design of LTE.

Stating the Obvious?

Without bothering to read the thesis....

Presumably the power that the gizmo can radiate to a range of 20M is sufficient to detonate the average bomb. Now even if the power just drops off on the the inverse square law (inverse cube is more likely here.) at a range of 10M the strength will be four times higher.

Assuming that the detonator sensitivity distribution curve is gaussian, median=modal=mean, and this WILL hold even after the power mapping hinted at above.

After the mapping, detonation rate per metre outside of the 20M radius will fall quickly, as both the distribution and the received power fall, just inside the "average" radius it will fall rather less quickly, since the power will get much greater as you approach the transmitter, and near the peak of the gausian distribution the differential is near zero. Put simply... half of the mines will blow before 20M, and the power available to blow mines at 10M will be four (pos eight, can't be bothered to read.) times as great as that.

Even if the variance of the first bell curve is wider than my ex girlfriend's bum. (Whch had it's own gravitational pull, no matter what she was wearing.) A simple grasp of A level stats shows that the overwhelming majority of susceptible mines will blow ata a safe(ish) distance.

Bombardment

There isn't much you can do about an inert supersonic balistic projectile once it's in flight. One of these could shell whitehall from 200 miles away, and the best you could do would be to evacuate.

CIWS works by disrupting a projectile that would otherwise explode on impact, and which might just fall to pieces once intercepted. Anti Ballistic Missiles work by nackering the guidance systems of incoming warheads, or just vapourising the warhead, so that it doesn't detonate. Neither of these countermeasure techniques will work against a simple solid lump of depleted uranium.

Say you want to take out a runway on the Falkland islands, one of these could do that before most navies could even tell that you were there. And even if ships don't go for station keeping, one of these could take out an entire harboured fleet in a few minutes.

As for generating power... we could take a leaf out of the German U boat book, and mount one of these on a nuclear sub. Surface, Shell, Submerge in ten minutes?

(Now I've got an idea about a 4.5 incher fitted into a trident launch tube;-)

Data recovery option?!

Having had a good laugh... (Or in other words having sworn a lot) at Seagate's piss-poor service of

"If your drive breaks we'll send you one we've fixed, if you want your data recovered it'll be 600 quid, and if you use any other recovery vendor we won't even give you a second hand drive." This £25 quid option sounds like it has been extended from god himself as an olive branch to remind me what wonders await repentant sinners in heaven.

25 quid for a three year waranty on drives I'll use for intermediate term archiving is a damn good deal! Admittedly I'd need more that 1 in 8 to fail before it was better value than disklabs, but still, nice that they've seen a customer wish and are filling it!

Now look here,

It's at best half true.

With bittorrent you have trackers, clients and indexes.

Clients are of course the software running on users domestic machines, and the overwhelming bulk of traffic involved in bittorrent is between clients, there is no point in concealing this traffic, and each client has an easy time finding out who the other clients are.

Next come the Trackers, these keep track of the clients in the swarm and give new clients an initial list of peers to communicate with. The amount of traffic isn't as high as peer-to-peer, so a tracker could be put at the end of a VPN or TOR-like system, but all the traffic would go through the bunker. Alternatively these machines could be simply hooked up in data centres, with IP addresses dished out from TPB, either way puts them out of the bunker, but either with a sizeable bandwidth problem, or with no geographical concealment.

Then comes the index, this is either in the bunker or on the end of VPN/TOR, and all the bandwidth goes through the bunker.

From the technobabble it sounds like the trackers and indexes are hooked up through a simple f***ing IP tunnel, and when TPB's current ISP gets upset, they'll change ISPs, change DNS, and then wait for everything else to catch up.

It's crappily engineered, overhyped, and far from invincible. And it smacks heavily of people who've watched to much Star Trek blurting out words in the hope that it'll sound impressive.

What's truly pathetic is that given the extreme intellect we're led to believe is required to understand freetard thinking, nobody has made any real refinements to bittorrent software or architecture to help TPB, people have however worked out how to spoof trackers to get higher performance ratios.

Yeah Right.

"With hair of bat, and shell of bunker, with blood of unicorn and horn of political party I call upon Satan to bless The Pirate Bay's elixir of bullshit special sauce."

That's all these guys are doing, waving all kinds of impressive sounding terms around as if it's going to magically legitimise and protect TPB.

It wont.

TPB has lost in court several times now, and there are a lot of jurisdictions that they don't even dream of setting up in because it's skullbuggeringly obvious that they'd lose.

Political parties, even those who have MPs in an elected chamber, don't have many magic legal rights. Regardless of whether The Pirate Party would throw copyright out if they got into power, they are still at this moment aiding a legally dubious practice. To all intents and purposes they're claiming that the law doesn't apply to them because they'd change it it they ever get in to power, that's hilariously delusional in it's own right, but it also goes down very badly with voters in most places.

If TPB setup it's servers in the office of... say... The Daily Sports, and said "newspaper" ended up getting cut off from the net, could we really wring our hands and sob about how the big bad MPAA was randomly crushing legitimate news outlets?

I admit that I think that copyright laws are pretty dumb, I'd even go so far as to say that they should only protect IP for 10 years or so. (Ten years after release most stuff is either out of print or in the bargain bin, or both!) But right now the endless stream of bollocks that is produced in the name TPB to try to claim that the law doesn't apply is offensive.

Shant!

Mature Discussion? On The Reg? No!

This "Human Infected with PC Virus" episode is empty publicity seeking, with absolutely no academic worth. It's proved nothing, but stoked more than a few drunken pub conversations by beer-educated "experts".

If Reading is happy to have this crap pushed out as being representative of their work, then they deserve all the scathing that man can level against them.

Thirteen years later...

Given the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the press about the "Hundreds of thousands who can't find places on degree courses." (Forcing them to stand in dole queues without degrees in fine art appreciation to keep them warm at night.) It's nicely clear that the entire university of reading could be nuked to hell and back, without setting human progress back a single heart beat.

Thirteen years after Blair's "Education Education Education" bullshit, this is what we've been left with in British Academia. Half a nation that thinks this was worth doing, and another half nation who thinks that this is all that engineering research is good for.

The end of the world as we know it...

If these people are genuinely the snake oil salesmen that have been flogging winfixer(sic) then I can't think of better examples of people to go down for online fraud.

They've made users lives a misery, I'm sure more than few techies have had to clear their shitty malware out of the machines of parents, girlfriends, boyfriends, etc. They've endlessly spread fear and confusion, and profited from every second of it. I'm sure globally they've done a few man-lifetimes worth of damage either in false sales, the hassle their "product" has caused, and the lack of protection that users end up with.

Maybe I'm just cranky before my morning coffee, but if by some contrived fluke of fate they somehow end up in the chair, I shall fly to the states, and spend the rest of my days camping infront of deathrow with a stereo blaring "Burn Baby Burn" and petitioning for the voltage to be low and take as long as possible. Since they've got an eternity of pain and suffering to look forward to, a few more hours in this world won't really count that much.

I have wanted to seriously hurt these people since the first time their advert tried to squeze an EXE onto my machine in (I think) 2004.

May they locked in stocks at the end of the shower block... if these are they of course.

I have to admit that I like the sound of this.

Sorry, that was before my first coffee.

I meant that the drive might have been external, and (entirely separately) that the kind of guy who's going to break into someones house to photograph their calender and nick drives for harebrained framing schemes probably isn't on speaking terms with reality.

Unless he's an MP of course...

Funny you should mention that

A few years ago there was a guy who was convicted after 150,000 or so kiddie porn images were found on his computer. Since it's just not possible to manually select and archive that many images in normal browsing. I've often wondered if it was pulled down by a crawler, or whether he'd been obsessively downloading the images without really thinking about what it was.

Missing Drives and Missing Witts,

To all the people wondering how the victim didn't notice that his disc was missing, nowhere in the article did it say that it was an internal drive.

From my limited experience of these kinds of people, some of them have such a sense of entitlement that they see anyone who interferes, even their love interest his/her self, as committing a crime against the universe itself. Once someone's got that mindset they expect absolutely everyone to assist them, he might well have believed that he just needed to make a token effort, and then the police would "see the light" and not really bother with technical details.

It's almost surprising that he bothered using a drive that had belonged to his victim, rather than just copying the data onto a USB stick and posting it to the plods.

Sir!I've sighted a Troll off the starboard bow!

And your beloved labour governments have, without exception, come into office promising free gobstoppers for all, which they can't afford, then had to borrow money from the americans, and in so doing sold control of British foreign policy to the yanks.

I'm not going to bother shooting down your TSR-II arguments, please learn to troll more subtly.

You've missed something allright.

In any project the following happens, a reasonable specification is laid down, and then heavily padded, this isn't padded "victorian style" to add a nice margin in the field. It's actually padded so that the next tier of managers can fel good about whitlling something down, without them cutting into anything important.

Now they're getting so good at the whitlling that they are cheerfully cutting right through the safety margin. They'd spot a simple doubling of design life, so instead the engineers have sneaked "twice the design life" into the testing phase. In practice all this does is increase the wedge on the tail end of the bell curve, rather than actually move the mean that the bell curve is focussed around.

It's called politics dear chap, and it's sadly missing from most undergrad, and even a few grad courses.

Somebody's invented a machine to stick your nuts in,

@mrlumpy

Regarding the falling targets in the UK at the moment.

Around about 2003 Blair had a bold and cunning plan to get Broadband to the masses...

"Redesignate Broadband as being 128KbPS or better. "

If you really want to suffer pain, pick up a current A level maths book and compare it to the same material of 15 years ago. Or look at A level sciences where a lot of material's been ripped out because 16 year olds can't cope with calculus. Incidentally Cancer prognosis's will look very much better when they start measuring patient's lives in dog years.

Still the great unwashed are very happy with the DVD players they bought on benefits, and the cars they've had cheap, and so on and so on, and will vote labour back in again and again.

Too much to ask,

It is of course far too much to ask for BT to set up a hotline for reporting this stuff?

An entry on their labyrinthian voice menu for example?

Try reporting this to customer services and I'd bet my right nad that you'd just get a canned speech about BTs disconnection procedure, or puzzled comments about your account being healthy, there is no way you'd actually be able to report what is essentially a criminal act in progress.

You can try telling the police, but they won't have any better time dealing with BT than you do.

Hmmmmm,

Certainly peri brought a couple of important qualities to that episode. (Davidson often remarked afterwards that his death scene was his finest moment of acting, but nobody's ever seen it because their attention goes elsewhere.)

I'd prefer Earthshock though, the script wasn't that good but Adric getting killed whjile trying to save the dinosaurs earns him a fairly unique Darwin award.

Shhh Shhh!

Shhh!

A notionally left wing party wants if to happen therefore it can, anyone who tells you otherwise based on "hard economic facts" or "laws of physics" or "bleeding common sense" is an evil Thatcherite who reads the daily mail.

Playmobile reconstruction!

@AC 20:26

Yes, and the Tornado was later, more expensive, poorer, and had it's own development costs.

So scrapping TSR-2 led to...

1) Lost exports of the same.

2) A long delay before it's role was sort-of filled by an inferior aircraft

3) Costs of developing said aircraft

4) Extra cost per unit.

but this wasn't a fiasco?

Better get over to downing street pronto, Brown wants you to lend mandy your dictionary!

The only reason that TSR-2 isn't a by-word for defence procurement fuckup is that it was so spectacular and irrational that a lot of people thought (and still think) that there was political foul play.

Job Creation Schemes.

How many of the "British" cars subsidised under the scrappage scheme have £2000's worth of parts and labour sourced in the UK? Probably not that many when you consider that huge sub-assemblies are imported from the far east. (Some vehicles just get the trims and mirros fitted here, said fittings are in the car's boot when it arrives from china!)

It's the same with BAE, Although maintaining a military aircraft capability in the UK could be done quite cheaply, keeping 20,000 labour voters busy in lancashire is quite expensive, particularly when BAE's shareholders and managers are taking their cut.

This may change after the election, unless lancashire suddenly turns blue, in which case all bets are off.

Meanwhile the overpriced shite from warton is cutting into funds that could buy decent kit for the lads in afgahnistan.

@Ted Dannington

"Time passes and with no Saws or Hostels about, the violence portrayed in Tarantino films starts to look distinctly hardcore."

Is that the same Tarantino who portrayed someone's head being blown to pieces with a pistol in True Romance? That's merely the first scene that springs to mind. Notably "Resevoir Dogs" was denied a certificate for some time. We are currently sliding down an entirely different slippery slope, where does it go? Animals tortured to death on film? Pyschotic killers murdering hordes of undifferentiated children while tossing himself off?

This is surprisingly common.

"Captivity" had a so called "plot" bolted on to the end after some jurisdictions declined it on the grounds that it wasn't just sick and crap, but that it was pointless as well. With a plot it had some sort of point and was so let through.

If this had been intercut with the torturers back story, explaining how his path through society had led to him doing these things, to these people, at this time, then we'd have "art" something that would engage the full intellect, _I_ might even try to watch it.

We have an 18R category to acknowledge that although porn might be fairly mindless and pointless, the base desires and instincts that it taps in to are healthy and normal. Without sex society would be extinict within a century. (AFAIK Rape scenarios fall outside of R18 by some margin.)

There are lots of bullies, sadists and chavs out there who do get off on making and seeing innocent people suffer for no good reason. If someone doesn't agree that a thirst for meaningless suffering is unhealthy than I doubt I've enough common ground to talk to them on.

While I know a few people who'll be scrambelling to watch this just to prove "It's not that bad, just the BBFC being oppressive"[1] I'm quite glad to have a warning to give this one a wide berth.

[1] Same people have also been known to stone-wall victims of street-beatings because "So-called chavs are normally harmless and must have been provoked, so he'll get no sympathy from me."

Re:Firmware

Yeah, I know.

Bloody mentality of only our core business matters. Of course the canteen food being safe is a legal requirement, the duty first aiders being trained is a legal requirement, but Software, HR, ohhhh boy.

The problem with origins,

Is that ultimately you have to deal with where the environment that nurtured the object arose from.

To explore the origins of the xenomorph species you either need to cover it's evolution (Which wouldn't be particularly gripping viewing.) Or you need to explain why someone created it. That could be quite fun, lots of alien species gabbling to each other with english sub titles, and a few distinctive words and phrases, then as the audience has subconsciously learnt alien for a couple of hours they could introduce some puns and other jokes.

To explore the origins of "The Company"'s knowledge and interest you basically have a political/office based drama set in the Alien universe. Something akin to "State Of Play", "Conspiracy Theory" or "LA Confidential". This could be quite interesting as it implies that the company was already aware of at least one alien species (The pilot's race) and had kept that knowledge from the public. This could be a lot like a cerebral prequel to "Independence Day", which might be a good thing.